Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mailrus!ncar!mephisto!mcnc!uvaarpa!mmdf
From: frech@mwraaa.army.mil (Norman R. Frech CPLS)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: seek
Message-ID: <1990Jun29.171643.13413@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 29 Jun 90 17:16:43 GMT
Sender: mmdf@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU (Uvaarpa Mail System)
Reply-To: frech@mwraaa.army.mil
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 13

Could someone give a few details concerning the seek function?  I am dealing
with several files at the same time, accessing certain field from each file.
One of the things I wanted to do is hash out a record number for one of the
files and seek to that record to grab the data.  As far as I could tell
when I tried to seek to the location it was actually pushing forward the 
number of characters not the number of records.  Also, is the whence from
the last seek or from the beginning of the file or what?  What I ended up
going is sequentially accessing the file from the beginning and counting
down to the hashed address.  There has to be a faster way and I was hoping
the seek would provide the method I am looking for.  Any information would
be appreciated.

Norm Frech < frech@mwraaa.army.mil >